Hiccups

ISSUE #61

You know the longest case of the hiccups lasted for sixty-eight years? Plagued a man for sixty-eight years. One man. An Iowan, no less. Google it.

I imagine at first it was like any other case. Only grew abnormal when he went to bed and woke up still burpin’. But still, he thought, any day now. Just a mighty long case.

A few weeks in, doctor’s visit. Months, and he started to pray. Asked himself, "What did I do here? Why me, what was my sin?" He's sure he’d inflicted it upon himself. At the first anniversary of the outbreak, it set in that this could just be his life. He prayed every day, bought all the snake oil, paid his brother to scare him shitless. Still they go uncured.

He met someone, as you do. Proposed, got married. Hiccuped through his vows. Hiccuped when his daughter was born. Hiccuped at her graduation. He learned to live with it. Wasn’t no reason, no sin. He was chosen, for good or evil, as a vessel for the involuntary, the spasms of the spirit. That’s not to say every morning he didn’t pray for the end. There were always a few seconds — sometimes two, sometimes six — before the first one came, that he’d think, "Maybe. Maybe today’s the day I’m cured."

It wasn’t. My point is, he kept waking up nonetheless.

We’re sometimes afflicted with one thing or another — irrational anxiety, unreasonable grief — the way he was hiccups. It may not go away. You get used to it, but you still wake up with it. Maybe there’s no reason for you to hear that right now, but some day you could need it. And at least you're breathing normal.